Teach Your Robot Well
Within a decade, personal robots could become as common in U.S. homes as any other major appliance, and many if not most of these machines will be able to perform innumerable tasks not explicitly imagined by their manufacturers. This opens up a wider world of personal robotics, in which machines are doing anything their owners [...]
New Software Responds to Students’ Emotions, Boredom
Emotion-sensing computer software that models and responds to students’ cognitive and emotional states – including frustration and boredom – has been developed by University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Psychology Sidney D’Mello and colleagues from the University of Memphis and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. D’Mello also is a concurrent assistant professor of computer science [...]
How to Control a Prosthesis with Your Mind
New brain-machine interfaces that exploit the plasticity of the brain may allow people to control prosthetic devices in a natural way. Imagine a piece of technology that would let you control an apparatus simply by thinking about it. Lots of people, it turns out, have dreamed of just such a system, which for decades has [...]
Researchers Seek Better Neural Control of Prosthetics for Amputees
Sandia National Laboratories researchers, using off-the-shelf equipment in a chemistry lab, have been working on ways to improve amputees’ control over prosthetics with direct help from their own nervous systems. Organic materials chemist Shawn Dirk, robotics engineer Steve Buerger and others are creating biocompatible interface scaffolds. The goal is improved prosthetics with flexible nerve-to-nerve or [...]
T-rays Technology Could Help Develop Star Trek-style Hand-held Medical Scanners
Scientists have developed a new way to create Terahertz waves (T-rays) that may one day lead to biomedical detective devices similar to the ‘tricorder’ scanner used in Star Trek. Scientists have developed a new way to create electromagnetic Terahertz (THz) waves or T-rays – the technology behind full-body security scanners.The researchers behind the study, published [...]
GABA Signaling Prunes Back Copious Provisional Synapses During Neural Circuit Assembly
Quite early in its development, the mammalian brain has all the raw materials on hand to forge complex neural networks. But forming the connections that make these intricate networks so exquisitely functional is a process that occurs one synapse at a time. An important question for neuroscience has been: how exactly do stable synapses form? [...]
Do You See What I See?
Scientists model brain structure to help computers recognize objects An essential question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can beidentified by simply “looking” at an image. Introspectively, we know that the human brain solves this problem very well. We only have to look at something to know what it is. But [...]
UCLA Neuroscientists Demonstrate Crucial Advances in Brain Reading
Innovative machine learning method anticipates neurocognitive changes, similar to predictive text-entry for cell phones, internet search engines At UCLA’s Laboratory of Integrative Neuroimaging Technology, researchers use functional MRI brain scans to observe brain signal changes that take place during mental activity. They then employ computerized machine learning (ML) methods to study these patterns and identify [...]
Researchers Create First Artificial Neural Network Out of DNA
Molecular soup exhibits brainlike behavior Artificial intelligence has been the inspiration for countless books and movies, as well as the aspiration of countless scientists and engineers. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now taken a major step toward creating artificial intelligence—not in a robot or a silicon chip, but in a test [...]
The Neuroscience of Creepy Robots – The Uncanny Valley Phenomenon
Your Brain on Androids Ever get the heebie-jeebies at a wax museum? Feel uneasy with an anthropomorphic robot? What about playing a video game or watching an animated movie, where the human characters are pretty realistic but just not quite right and maybe a bit creepy? If yes, then you’ve probably been a visitor to [...]
